Hardware acceweration is advantageous for performance, and practicaw when de functions are fixed so updates are not as needed as in software sowutions. Wif de advent of reprogrammabwewogic devices such as FPGAs, de restriction of hardware acceweration to fuwwy fixed awgoridms has eased since 2010, awwowing hardware acceweration to be appwied to probwem domains reqwiring modification to awgoridms and processing controw fwow.[5][6][7]

Hardware execution units do not in generaw rewy on de von Neumann or modified Harvard architectures and do not need to perform de instruction fetch and decode steps of an instruction cycwe and incur dose stages' overhead. If needed cawcuwations are specified in a register transfer wevew hardware design, de time and circuit area costs dat wouwd be incurred by instruction fetch and decoding stages can be recwaimed and put to oder uses.

This recwamation saves time, power and circuit area in computation, uh-hah-hah-hah. The recwaimed resources can be used for increased parawwew computation, oder functions, communication or memory, as weww as increased input/output capabiwities. This comes at de opportunity cost of wess generaw-purpose utiwity.

As device mobiwity has increased, de rewative performance of specific acceweration protocows has reqwired new metricizations, considering de characteristics such as physicaw hardware dimensions, power consumption and operations droughput. These can be summarized into dree categories: task efficiency, impwementation efficiency, and fwexibiwity. Appropriate metrics consider de area of de hardware awong wif bof de corresponding operations droughput and energy consumed.[14]

Suppose we wish to compute de sum of 220=1,048,576{\dispwaystywe 2^{20}=1,048,576}integers. Assuming warge integers are avaiwabwe as bignumwarge enough to howd de sum, dis can be done in software by specifying (here, in C++):

Modern processors are muwti-core and often feature parawwew "singwe-instruction; muwtipwe data" (SIMD) units. Even so, hardware acceweration stiww yiewds benefits. Hardware acceweration is suitabwe for any computation-intensive awgoridm which is executed freqwentwy in a task or program. Depending upon de granuwarity, hardware acceweration can vary from a smaww functionaw unit, to a warge functionaw bwock (wike motion estimation in MPEG-2).